thread: 2006-03-08 : Between-session Activity
On 2006-03-10, Calithena wrote:
I'm personally interested in the way people get into making costumes for RenFaire as an outgrowth of AD&D play, or turn their ordinary social lives into a Vampire mini-larp when they all go out to Denny's together in their goth gear and fake teeth. That's not 'play' in much of any sense, but on the other hand the fact that people take this stuff up and use it to make meaning in their lives is tremendously interesting to me. Like Thor the Barbarian.
An intermediate case: I've had a collaborative fantasy world (used for various versions of D&D, TFT, and T&T as well as for more recent homebrews) shared with about five GMs and more than a hundred players, going back to the late seventies. One thing that some of the members of this group do is sit around and bull about 'what's happening where'. Sometimes maps get redrawn to incorporate new stuff; sometimes a GM will get inspiration for his neck of the woods and start a new miniseries there. So there's a higher-level social campaign management process, mostly informal, that contributes in a BIG way to play; and leads to some odd interactions across players and across the country, as the players in one group discover they need a magic sword possessed by a character in another group, etc.
I'm actually working on rules to formalize this world management process within a group, because I think this is really fun, and has made my life somewhat richer. But note: a lot of the richness comes from the collaborativeness.
But then I think about my old friend Vickie and how she used to make stuff for Renfaire and relate them to what her characters were doing in Pat Farley's (www.e-sheep.com) old D&D game in high school that we played in, and wonder where exactly the line is between stuff like this and the Vampire kids at Denny's.
